Every place has a woman more interesting than the giant bronze statue in the main square.

She may run the hotel nobody can get into, the restaurant everybody claims to have discovered, or the studio that made a forgotten street expensive. She may also have been dead for 200 years, which means I am now crossing town in inappropriate shoes looking for a plaque the size of a postcard.

This is Leap by Faith. I follow women into places.

My name is Faith Katunga. I am a Malawian-born, Milan-based journalist writing about travel, culture, history, and the women who make places far more interesting than the standard itinerary suggests. They can all be inspiring. Inspiration, after all, is not always tidy, linear, or particularly well-behaved.

They are glamorous, difficult and occasionally impossible. Some built empires. Others blew them up. One ignored the warning and went anyway. Another turned her drawing room into the city’s unofficial parliament. There are designers who changed how women dressed, politicians who made entire countries furious and conservationists holding ecosystems together while tourists take pictures.

What interests me is the leap – leaving home, taking power, beginning again, walking into a room that was not expecting you, and occasionally making such a spectacular mess of things that history has no choice but to remember your name.

I write (and talk) about women from the past and women making trouble, money, art, policy, dinner, and history right now. Expect explorers, chefs, hoteliers, founders, designers, salon hosts, politicians, conservationists, and professional nuisances of the highest order.

Usually, I hear one name and lose the rest of the afternoon. Twelve tabs appear, and a biography is ordered with quickness. Suddenly, a train ticket begins to feel necessary. I want to see what she built, walk where she walked, find out who tried to stop her, and understand the place through the life she lived there. When the story is still unfolding, I want to sit across from her and ask what really happened.

There will be travel essays, interviews, destination guides, cultural reporting, women-led histories, and dispatches from wherever the trail goes next.

Some stories may inspire you. Others may scandalize you a little, improve your dinner conversation, or convince you that the reasonable thing to do is book the flight.

Why subscribe?

For the women worth walking past the bronze statue for.

Subscribers get every Leap by Faith story in full, from reported travel essays, interviews, destination guides, women-led histories, and dispatches from the road, plus access to the complete archive.

Come for the brilliant women. Stay for the scandal, the history, the very good hotel, and the occasional flight you now feel compelled to book.